A quick note about one of the plug-ins in the omino suite: Omino Snake!

It was written late one night for a specific purpose. I was doing some promotional animations for my friends’ Science Tarot deck, and got to “High Priestess, Benzene Dream” in which Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz dreams of a snake eating its tail. And this was the mystery of the benzene ring-shaped molecule.

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click forhttp://www.youtube.com/embed/1C794TJALZw?rel=0

I wanted the snake to follow along a path. So, Omino Snake wraps any layer along a mask path, like so:

The results can be a little bit “chunky”; Omino Snake just dices the source image into thin triangles and spreads them out. You can adjust the “draw step” parameter to step in smaller amounts to help smooth it.

You could do the same thing, more or less, by animating with the Puppet tool, but it would be a bit tedious.